The workplace the Rams reported to on Monday to open the first day of Organized Team Activities looked dramatically different than the one they gathered at this time a year ago.

The manner in which they accept, embrace and manage the challenges presented by those incredible differences will go a long way toward determining their fate next season.

Jared Goff is no longer a question mark, but rather a proven NFL quarterback coming off a Pro Bowl appearance in just his second season. For all the Rams star power, and his publicly low-key demeanor, he is the leader.

There is no more talk about Todd Gurley being a one-year wonder. He strolled into the Rams’ Thousand Oaks headquarters for the first day of OTA’s the reigning NFL Offensive Player of the Year. And determined to get better.

No one is talking about Sean McVay with dubious curiosity, even though he remains the youngest head coach in the NFL. The wonders he worked across the last 12 months breathing life into a long-suffering franchise established the 32-year-old as an up-and-coming NFL coaching star and part of the foundation from which the Rams will build for the foreseeable future.

As for the Rams themselves, they’re coming off a division championship and their first playoff appearance in 13 years, not gnashing their teeth searching for answers after another miserable season.

And by all accounts, they’re an even better team today than the one that galloped through a remarkable breakthrough season last year, the result of adding Pro Bowl caliber players Brandin Cooks, Aqib Talib, Marcus Peters and Ndamukong Suh in a flurry of aggressive moves that left even their own players in awe.

Said Gurley: “Super excited…Just having an All-Pro, Pro Bowl-type of guys come in, it just gets you super excited. A guy like Talib, who’s been to a Super Bowl. He knows what it takes. Obviously there’s a lot of hard workers on this team, but if you never reach that level, you don’t really know. So to bring in a guy like that, a guy like Marcus Peters, who’s been leading the league in picks the last couple of years, Suh, an All Pro-type of guy, Sam Shields … you got a guy like Cooks who just came from a Super Bowl team. He just knows the culture, and he can bring all that here. It’s super exciting.”

The Rams have arrived, in a major way. And by pushing even more chips to the middle of the table, they’re acting the part.

So yeah, things are quite a bit different around the Rams these days. They know it. We know it. Hell, the whole NFL knows it.

That’s a good thing, of course. And why would the Rams want it any other way, considering the long, painful road they traveled to get here?

But a different atmosphere also means different expectations. And with that, an entirely different perception from the outside world. The Rams are no longer the easy opponent on the schedule. They’re among the feared. The ability to manage the former while confronting the later will be a fascinating subplot over the next nine months.

Which made Monday so fascinating.

It would have been so easy for the Rams to already be thinking big picture. Almost expected, really. You’d be hard-pressed to find any Rams’ fan that already isn’t. Or pundit, for that matter. Every NFL-related TV or radio show you tune into these days is talking about the Rams in terms of a potential Super Bowl appearance.

It would be such a sweet fragrance, if it weren’t so poisonous.

See, no matter how loudly players argue they don’t get caught up in all the chatter, trust me, they do. The good and the bad. And while the good comes disguised as your best friend, it’s just as likely to stab you in the back as it is to provide the fuel that carries you the distance.

It’s only one day, but the Rams seem to have resisted taking a bite from the evil side of the apple.

The focus Monday was literally on taking one small step. Nothing more, nothing less.

“I don’t want to make it bigger than it is, because we have tremendous players,” Brockers said. “We’ve brought in tremendous talents, but at the same time, we still have to put the work in. We can’t fall into the hype. We just have to put our heads down and continue to grind and just show the work that we’ve put in, in the shadows and in training, will come to fruition in the future.”

It was boring. It was mundane. It won’t make any headlines. But it was prudent.

“There’s a confidence that exists from having some previous experience where you were able to obtain a little bit of success,” McVay said. “But this league is too competitive, the players are too good. You’ll get humbled very quickly if you kind of just rest on your laurels. I think that’s the exciting thing for us is let’s focus on what we can do to evolve and improve every single day and make sure we’re just focusing on that one-day-at-a-time mindset and mentality to get better.”

It was only day one of a long journey. But it’s never too early for a test.

Vincent Bonsignore is an NFL columnist for the Southern California News Group. Having covered the Los Angeles sports scene for more than two decades, Bonsignore has emerged as one of the leading voices on the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, the NFL and NFL relocation.